The quiet Canary Islands

Why go to La Palma

La Palma may not have much in terms of conventional 'sights',
but there's plenty to gawp at. The capital town (I hesitate to call
it a city) of Santa Cruz de la Palma has a tiny 'historic centre'
with Renaissance palaces, churches and a town hall, all in the
distinctive Canarian style combining whitewash and dark volcanic
stone. It has two cobbled shopping streets and a seafront
avenue like a cute version of the grandly sweeping harbour walls of
Havana, Cadiz or Cartagena.

Santa Cruz is wonderfully sleepy and antiquated. Ground-floor
offices open out onto the street, Latin American-style. Lovers of
retro will thrill to the original 1970s shopfronts, the provincial
fashions that seem to have taken years, decades even, to ripple out
to this far-western outpost of Europe. The food market, on the site
of what was once a convent cloister, sells tropical fruit with
unfamiliar names, island cheeses, vegetables and wines. When it
began to rain, I ducked into the town museum for a solitary mooch
around its colonial patios to learn about the silk-making and
tobacco-growing traditions of La Palma. (The island is one of the
few places in Europe where fine cigars are made from locally grown
tobacco, and where silk is spun from silkworm cocoons following
methods unchanged since the 16th century.)

The island's rural villages are pretty as pictures, their
pitchedroofed houses in the colonial style gaily painted in tones
of pink, pinky-purple, mint-green, azure, pale yellow, ochre and
rust-red. My favourite was Santo Domingo de Garafía, high on the
remote north coast. It seemed to snooze in a bucolic dream, its
cobbled streets and neat sash-windowed houses now almost deserted.
West of Garafía I reached a twilight zone of ancient craggy pines
in dark, mossy valleys. At Puntagorda the steep terraces were a
riot of pink and white almond blossom. Down by Fuencaliente in the
far south, I paid €3 to walk around the rim of a small but
perfectly formed volcano crater.